Ancient Gods

While traveling around Arcanum, you'll no doubt find several altars to the ancient gods of the world. If you talk to Aldous T. Buxington at the university in Tarant, he'll give you some clues about what the altars can do. In particular, he'll give you a book describing the gods and what you should offer them, and he'll have a painting called "Mazzerin's Mystery" hanging on his wall. The painting (shown above) gives you the relationships between the gods.

If you just go to an altar and give the correct offering, you'll get a blessing. The trick is to give the offerings in the correct order so you can accumulate blessings and eventually gain Velorien's (the All-Father's) blessing.

There are three circles of gods. When you give an offering to the greater god at the end of a circle, you'll lose all the other blessings from the lesser circles. And when you gain the blessing from Velorien, you'll lose the blessings from the greater gods. However, you don't have to continue making offerings if you don't want to. If you prefer the blessing you have to the one you would gain, then there's no reason to continue.

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Each of the lesser gods worship a certain race. There are three types of lesser gods: Noble, Neutral and Evil. Unless you give the offerings in the correct order, you will have only one blessing active at a time.

Attention: Technologists can't talk to the merchant so it's best to buy a statue at the beginning of the game. It is still possible to get it by breaking open the chest of the Ashbury merchant or via lockpicking, but this is obviously not optimal.

Offering: When you arrive you will find that you cannot make an offering because the statue has been stolen. You need to complete the quest Find the Stolen Idol first. After completing the quest, you can offer a Passion Root, which is growing nearby.

NOTE: It's useful to know that each skill can range from 0 to 20. That would mean that getting +12 Melee from Velorien's Blessing would give you 12 out of 20 possible points in that skill. Whenever you raise a skill manually (with Character Points) you generally raise it +4. The algorithm is slightly more complex - you can find it on the Skills page.